News

Nursery News:

Happy New Year! We hope you had a fantastic Christmas and a great time over the festive season. We have an exciting year ahead as we move into 2018, and look forward to working on lots of fun activities with the children.

As you may have noticed, our neighbour has installed a bar across the side-gate, which now prevents access to the buggy shed from the side entrance. We apologise for any inconvenience caused, but would appreciate it if you could bear with us as we try to find an alternative solution. In the meantime, if you do have a buggy could you please collapse it and carry it down the stairs at the front of the building once you have dropped off your child. We will keep you updated with any further developments on the situation; however during this time if you could please refrain from using next doors drive way for access to the nursey.

In addition, we would also like to kindly remind you that the carpark nextdoor is strictly not to be used by parents from the nursery.

Staffing: We waved a temporary goodbye to two of our staff members in December, Amy Kelleher and Hayley Imrie, who have left us to go on maternity leave. We wish them well and look forward to meeting their new babies very soon!

Policies and procedures: Each month, to help parents understand more about the policies in place at Magic Steps Nursery, we will be including one of our Policy and Procedures documents with the newsletter. If you have any queries regarding the content of these documents, please contact the office. This month please find attached our ‘Managing Challenging Behaviour’ policy and procedure.

Employee of the Month (December)

Employee of the month for December was Nicole Dowsett (Little Leprechauns). Nicole was nominated for being ‘a great team player, hard working, happy to help with anything, and always getting on with tasks’, showing ‘constant enthusiasm, and her positive interaction with the children’, for her ‘creative ideas and activities’, and for having ‘a great bond with the children and good relationships with parents’.

This month’s topic will be based on “Transport”

Baby Leprechauns

Baby Leprechauns will have lots of fun exploring their senses with shredded paper, sand, grass and paint. They will create patterns in paint to make firework pictures to celebrate New Year; make tracks with cars in paint; as well as get messy using their hands and feet. They will also build a ‘loading bay’ so that they can develop their fine motor skills to load up, fill and empty different sensory resources from trucks and other vehicles. The children will start to learn each other’s names and how to share toys by taking part in small group activities. such as rolling a ball, trucks or cars to each other, and taking turns to complete a puzzle; learn about showing affection for people who are special to them by looking at photographs of their friends and family, with staff introducing simple caring words into their language; experiment using their bodies to dance, by moving their legs and arms and doing lots of wiggling to different musical beats; and learn how to tidy up in the room with support from staff as they start to identify the different labels on boxes and storage containers.

For cooking this month babies will be making healthy apple vehicles with wheels out of grapes, yummy traffic light cookies on lolly sticks, and spiral biscuits to celebrate the New Year.

Extracurricular activities:

Hartbeeps –Wednesday 2:15pm

Little Leprechauns

This month Little Leprechauns will be busy using their imagination to make and talk about different forms of transport, such as cars, trains and planes. They will learn and experiment with different natural waste resources, using them for junk modelling; explore their senses and learn words such as ‘sticky’, ‘slimy’, ‘sparkly’, ‘fluffy’, to describe textures using materials such as hair gel, glitter and shaving foam; and make boats with a variety of materials so that they can explore and learn how materials change when adding something to them, or when using different tools. Little Leprechauns will also use their fine motor skills to practise making marks, and start to form letters that make up their names, using flour, sand and paint; join in a special puppet picnic where staff will encourage the children to talk in a group, as well as one-to-one, about their favourite nursery rhymes and stories, using the puppets as props to support their speech and language development; and learn how to count using toys and objects, as well as movements such as steps, jumps and claps – the staff will be planning activities following the children’s interests in their favourite toys to support them to be able to count up to, and beyond, 10.

For their cooking activities this month Little Leprechauns will cut out car shaped sandwiches and fill them with healthy vegetables including cucumber, tomatoes and carrots. They will also make chocolate traffic light biscuits and yummy pizza boats.

Extracurricular activities:

Hartbeeps – Wednesday 2:40pm

Little Kickers –Fridays 2:30pm

Pixies

Throughout January Pixies will have lots of fun making firework pictures for the New Year, using paint and straws to create a ‘splatter’ effect and making different patterns and marks. They will be talking about different types of transport during circle time, how they travel to nursery and discussing their favourite forms of transport; make pictures and use junk modelling to create their favourite vehicles, as well as using lots of different materials to make a large collage of a bus for a colourful display in the room; design and build a spaceship using lots of boxes and covering them in silver foil; and use their imagination to talk about where they would like to travel to and what they will see, to support their communication and language development. To encourage children’s understanding of primary and secondary colours and how colours change, children will be mixing different coloured paints, talking about different shades, their favourite colours as well as making traffic light pictures. They will also make traffic lights out of boxes and paint them so that they can use them in the garden, as well as designing a road – the staff will support them to learn to identify their left and right hands as they pretend to indicate and manoeuvre around the road using the cars and bikes.

To support Pixies’ understanding and recognition of numbers and letters they will be concentrating on a letter and number of the month. This month they will focus on the number ‘3’ and the letter ‘C’. The staff will introduce these during group time, as well as incorporating them into the activities throughout the day. This is in addition to the daily phonics sessions that are included in the timetable.

Pixies will be busy making fruit kebabs using traffic light coloured fruit; ‘rocky road’ biscuits with marshmallows, raisins and crushed biscuits; as well as traffic light cookies, a yummy sponge cake and fantastic oaty flapjacks.

Extracurricular activities:

French lessons – Tuesdays at 10:00am

Ballet dance – Thursdays at 2:15pm

Little Kickers – Fridays at 3:00pm

From the office

Please can we remind parents to:

Provide appropriate named clothing for children including wellies, warm coats, hats and gloves.

Close all gates for the children’s safety.

Fold your child’s buggy when using the buggy shed.

Bring in any unwanted kitchen items that would be suitable for our Pixies room e.g. baking trays, spoons, pot and pans etc.

Bring in any empty boxes or cardboard tubes from home that we can use for junk modelling.

We have lost property boxes in all of the rooms with clothing that is unnamed. Please feel free to check through the boxes if any of your child’s clothing has gone missing.

Dates for your diary 2018

31st January: Tu B’Shevat (New Year for Trees) – a Jewish holiday which marks the new year for trees in Israel. It’s a time of renewal in nature when the earliest-blooming trees awaken from their dormant winter state and begin a new fruit-bearing cycle.